Who Ya Gonna Call?

The New Ghostbusters Will Be an Origin Story, So Don’t Expect a Female Venkman

The Ontario Ghostbusters—including two women!—attend the Bill Murray Day festivities at the Toronto International Film Festival.

By Katie Calautti

Who could play a female Peter Venkman? And what would she be like?

I asked this question on Twitter yesterday, after the news broke that The Heat director Paul Feig and writer Katie Dippoldwould re-unite to make an all-female version of Ghostbusters. Everyone else was clearly thinking about it, too; I got dozens of responses, from huge names like Tina Fey and Zooey Deschanel to up-and-comers Jenny Slate and Leslie Jones. A female version of Venkman would presumably be the kind of career-launching role it was for Bill Murray: sarcastic, sexy, and heroic, Venkman is the comedian’s version of Han Solo, and the kind of role women so, so rarely get to be on-screen.

As it turns out, they probably won’t get to be a Venkman type in the new Ghostbusters either—and that’s actually a good thing. Talking to Entertainment Weekly in very vague detail about his plans for the movie, Feig didn’t exactly say there’s no female Venkman or Egon or Ray,” but certainly hinted at it:

“We want to have fun with giving nods to what came before, but we don’t want to be bound by it because Katie and I already have talked at length and we have really fun ideas for things. But we want to tell the stories that we would like to tell, which means we want to tell the character arcs that we want to tell, which means we want to start with some of our characters in a different place or with different personalities and things they have to overcome and learn through the experience of this first movie.”

As Feig describes it, the new Ghostbusters will be an origin story, set in a world where there were no previous Ghostbusters, no Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, and no sense in the general public that ghosts are even real. Any nods to the original film will be just that—“We want to do clever nods to it, but not cloying nods to it”—or possibly cameos from the original stars, whom Feig calls “my comedy heroes” and whom he promises, “So as far as I’m concerned, anybody wants to come back I welcome with open arms. It would just be in different roles now, but it would be fun to figure out how to do that.”

If I were to guess, I’d expect something a little less winking than 21 Jump Street, which acknowledged the original TV show essentially only to skewer it, but less slavish than modern remakes like Total Recall and RoboCop, which relied so heavily on the originals for meaning that they seemed pointless. The new Ghostbusters will also, hopefully, be funny, with Feig already promising that he has so many funny women in mind to star that the hard part will be narrowing them down. He says that Bill Murray’s suggestion of Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Linda Cardellini, and Emma Stone would be “an awesome cast,” but doesn’t acknowledge that lineup’s one obvious flaw: diversity. It’s a remarkably progressive step to even have female Ghostbusters, but much of that would be undercut if the lineup is all white, even less diverse than the 1984 crew that included Ernie Hudson. That not only gives you some really specific ideas for casting choices—Maya Rudolph, Sasheer Zamata, Mindy Kaling, Rashida Jones, and Retta are all presumably getting phone calls this week—but another way to look forward to the new Ghostbusters sets itself apart from the original. Who needs a female Peter Venkman when you could get Retta busting ghosts instead?